Jack Ma’s ABH rejected us for the next stage but the reason is a little funny
I wasn’t groveling enough for someone that wanted to get to the next stage and I find that very appalling because that’s why we don’t have so many real builders in the ecosystem anymore, just charistmatic thieves. We keep funding smooth talkers and people that tell sweet stories instead of building businesses that have great unit economics and are actually good and doing well. So many ideas that sound good in theory but not in practicality because the founder told a good story and played the “game”.
You’ve probably heard about “first mover advantage”: if you’re the first entrant into a market, you can capture significant market share while competitors scramble to get started. That can work, but moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover – that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits.
Summary: Peter Thiel’s Zero To One
Read the pitch decks that helped 17 creator economy startups raise millions of dollars
Skye, a career-coaching startup, had different decks depending on the type of investor or fund they were pitching to.
“I had two different versions, depending on the fund,” said Jessica Wolf, Skye’s CEO and cofounder. “If I knew a fund was more into pre-seed, all about the founder, I had one deck. But if I knew that they were a numbers person, I would use another one.”
Judgment Is the Decisive Skill
Ultimately, everything else that you do is actually setting you up to apply your judgment. One of the big things that people rail on is CEO pay. For sure there’s crony capitalism that goes on where these CEOs control their boards and the boards give them too much money.
But, there are certain CEOs who definitely earned their keep because their judgment is better.
Naval: And the reason why a lot of the top investors, a lot of the value investors, like if you read Jeremy Grantham, or you read Warren Buffet, or you read up on Michael Burry, these people sound like philosophers, or they are philosophers, or they’re reading a lot of history books or science books.
Why Carnegie Mellon’s condemnation of a professor’s viral tweet is troubling.
Since the death of Elizabeth was a massive news story and the tweet was going viral, the university’s administrators seem to have succumbed to public pressure to sanction Anya in some way out of a desire to defend the university’s reputation. As I’ve described at length before, the tendency of organizations to cave to spontaneously formed social media mobs is a terrible thing for a culture of free speech, and it’s a labor issue, too. There is always the option of trying to wait out the mob, which often dissipates as quickly as it forms.
OUR PROFESSIONAL DECLINE IS COMING (MUCH) SOONER THAN YOU THINK
Here’s how to make the most of it.
